Cough, cough…what?
Editorial: Bringing some vital balance to social media
Proposed law should limit the harm that trolls and other bullies can do to celebrities and the rest of us
…Ummmmmm. What?
It’s all well and good for the NZ Herald to wax lyrical over the awful Trolls and the awful social media and the awful social media trolls in relation to the death of Charlotte Dawson, but does it strike anyone else as the most disingenuous editorial ever written?
This is the newspaper who employs one of Charlotte Dawson’s most hated mainstream media Trolls – Rachel Glucina who delighted in tormenting Dawson. This is the same newspaper who printed what I think we can universally acknowledge was the most disgusting review of Dawson’s death by Deborah Hill Cone .
Add to this their continued employment of Bob Jones who this year was delighting in boasting about how he goaded a protester into committing suicide.
Promoting new laws on the internet while utterly neglecting their own trolling is a tad bulshitty isn’t it?
We seem to confuse criticism with cruelty and Humans are capable of terrible cruelty to one another. The line for me is always in terms of power. Those with power should be criticised and challenged every step of the way, those without power deserve understanding and forgiveness.
The NZ Herald made money from promoting columns that are part of the torment, pointing to the internet and demanding legislation while ignoring any hand they themselves had to play seems unworthy of editorial comment.
… this is the same newspaper who interfered with the outcome of the 2008 election by running the headline “Key has got the numbers” two days before we went to the polls – and a democrat would argue that there should be a law about that too, and it being enforced.
This is the paper than runs celebrity tittle tattle about Dawson and Mike Hosking online this morning, and did not mention the events of the Ukraine.
This is the paper that runs daily stories about a party that gets 0% in electoral polls.
This is the paper that regularly puts crime on its front pages, then promotes the 0%’s new fear mongering crime policy.
The Herald… misleading and distracting NZers in the service of the corporates who own it.
The Herald becomes more absurd every day.
Not to mention that the Herald but even more so Stuff allow all sorts of anonymous hater comments beneath their stories. The policy seems to be that anything that engenders more extreme emotions and feedback is good. Moderating comments so that that arguments are balanced and progress, and lead to a better informed reader doesn’t get a look in.
All this “cyber-bullying” hysteria is contrived to win public sympathy for the Harmful Digital Communications Bill, which is a step towards state control of public debate on the internet. Imagine Parliament were debating a Harmful Print Communications Bill, or Harmful Broadcast Communications Bill, and see what you think of the censorship tribunal Collins and co plan to set up to keep us online commentators in check. I highly recommend people read the Tech Liberty analysis of this bill:
http://techliberty.org.nz/submission-harmful-digital-communications-bill/
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